travel tech insights

Travel and tourism are both ostensibly about making connections, whether it be with the people you meet during your journey or with the culture and landscape of your destination. It’s about creating dynamic, symbiotic experiences that come with learning about new people and places with similarities and differences from your own life experience.

Which is why is make sense that the travel industry is built on connections and interactions between several different entities throughout a travel company’s value chain to provide the very best value and experience for customers. A complex distribution system of retail travel agents, travel service wholesalers, and local tourism agencies who contract with wholesalers all work to provide travelers with the knowledge, products, and services to ensure a smooth, hassle-free travel experience.

Everyone knows the old saying you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but at the same time everyone knows the importance of making a positive first impression. It’s a paradox that relies solely judging a book by it’s cover, but it’s a paradox we live with on a daily basis and one that travel companies must reckon with when it comes to their web presence and the responsiveness of their website.

Imagine: You log on to a travel company’s website to research a destination or complete a booking and the site takes seemingly forever to load. Images don’t display properly, text is difficult to read, and drop-down bars and navigation tabs don’t function and impede your ability to move through the site. You try to access the same site later from a smartphone and tablet and encounter the same issues again, only this time their magnified because the site is not equipped to handle mobile interfacing. Frustrated with this experience, you ditch this website in favor of a competitor which offers a more simple, clean web-based interaction.

This is what is meant by a responsive website: a website design that recognizes a visitor’s device, changes page configurations for best viewing, and is capable of displaying with optimal functionality across all spectrums of devices - desktop, laptop, tablet, and more.

President Obama made good on his pledge to loosen trade and travel restrictions with Cuba in March by a long-awaited visit that signaled goods, services, and tourists will soon be able to move freely to and from the small island nation just 90 miles south of United States. And would-be travelers wasted no time in declaring their desire to visit Cuba as soon as possible, according to a recent survey conducted by the travel industry publication Skift that found roughly 25 percent of Americans asked said they plan to visit Cuba within the next year.

Within the tour industry the trends of early 2016 are mirroring those of 2015: customers are increasingly looking for customized offerings that promise highly personalized travel experiences.  It’s not surprising: who doesn’t want to return from a trip with a sense of having authentically experienced that part of the world?  What travelers wouldn’t want to feel they really know something where they’ve been, and that where they’ve been is unique – more than just another gondola ride in Venice?  The question is – how are savvy tour companies responding to these trends?

There are times when all of us make the mistake of assuming we know the facts behind an event, trend or circumstance - only to learn at some point how very wrong our unchallenged assumptions and beliefs were.  For instance, take a recent event, light years removed from the travel industry, which undercut a flawed understanding held by many people.